Fortino Sámano (the overflowing of the poem), translated by Cynthia Hogue and Sylvain Gallais, with French on facing pages, is a collaborative work by the emerging French poet, Virginie Lalucq, and the distinguished philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Lalucq wrote the serial poem, Fortino Sámano, after seeing an exhibit of photographs on the Mexican Revolution by Agustin Victor Casasola. Her series is a meditation on the single, extant photograph of Sámano, a Zapatista lieutenant and counterfeiter, which Casasola snapped as Sámano, smoking a last cigar, appeared to stare death nonchalantly in the face moments before his execution by firing squad (it was reported that he himself gave the order to fire). Little is known about Sámano, and Lalucq's poem makes no attempt to be biographical or historical. Rather, she treats the image itself, the fact that the camera caught the image of life just prior to its end. What, then, does the image represent? She asks. Nancy's section, Les débordements du poème (The overflowing of the poem), is a series of poetic commentaries on each of the poems in Lalucq's series. It is a philosophical contemplation of the specific poem, Fortino Sámano, and also, a poetic investigation of the lyric genre, which works hand-in-hand with Lalucq's poems. Fortino Sámano is an exciting poetic dialogue, and a significant work in poetics, which Hogue and Gallais have brought into English.
About the Author: VIRGINIE LALUCQ was born May 8, 1975 in Paris. She is the author of Couper les tiges (Act Mem/ Comp'act, 2001) and Fortino Sámano (with Jean-Luc-Nancy, Galilée 2004). Her poetry was included in the anthology Autres territoires, edited by Henri Deluy (Ferrago/Leo Scheer, 2003), and has been published in numerous journals, most notably Action poétique, Action restreinte, L'Animal, Les cahiers de Benjy, Issue, Java, Nioques, Les Lettres françaises, and La revue des resources. She is a founding member of the editorial collective for the journal Nioques. The Center for the Study of Poetry (ENS) in Lyons describes Lalucq's poetry thus: « A certain desire to experiment characterizes her work, a desire that translates most clearly in the number of collaborative performance and writing projects in which she has engaged, and the diversity of the source materials on which she draws in her poetry. » Lalucq has given numerous readings and lectures, and participates regularly in print journal and blog discussions. She is a librarian at the National Foundation of the Political Sciences, and lives with her husband and son in a quiet and unusually woodsy quarter of Paris. JEAN-LUC NANCY was born on July 26, 1940 in Caudéran (Gironde, France). He trained in philosophy and biology at the Sorbonne and the Institute of Philosophy in Strasbourg. In 1973, he completed his Doctorate (directed by Paul Ricoeur), and in 1987, he received his Ph.D. summa cum laude (Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard both served on his doctoral jury). From 1988- 1998, Nancy was Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch (University of Strasbourg), where he was awarded a Distinguished Professor in 1998, which he held until his retirement in 2002. Nancy has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor around the world, at the Universities of Berlin, California (Berkeley, Irvine, and San Diego), and Australia/Melbourne, among others. In 2002, Nancy was awarded the "Liberty" Prize by the International Center for Peace in Sarajevo, and in 2005, he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor in France. He is the author of many books, among the most recent of which, Au fond des images (Galilée 2003), was a great influence on Virginie Lalucq as she wrote Fortino Sámano, which was translated into English as The Ground of the Image (Fordham UP, 2005). Nancy and his wife, who have three children, live in Strasbourg. CYNTHIA HOGUE was born on August 26, 1951 in the Midwest, and raised in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. As an undergraduate, she studied the art of literary translation, taking classes at Oberlin College in which she worked from trots (translating classical Japanese poetry in combination with the study of Ezra Pound's translation work), as well as taking courses in German and French literature. At the time, although fluent in French, she was drawn to the German poetry that she studied with her advisor, the poet and translator Stuart Friebert. After a junior year in Denmark and a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship to Iceland (1978- 1979), however, during which time she became fluent in both Scandinavian languages, she remained in Iceland for three years in all, translating poetry from both countries. After the tragic suicide of her Danish collaborative translator, however, she returned to the States, pursued a Ph.D. in English, and set translation work aside for twenty-five years. She took it back up after being invited to develop a course on literary translation for the MFA program at Arizona State University. The class was a great success, but she felt like a fake teaching the art but not practicing it any longer. By 2008, however, she was spending each summer in France (having by then married Sylvain Gallais), returning to her once-fluent but now-rusty French. Among the books she procured, at the suggestion of an expatriate American poet and translator in Paris, were Virginie Lalucq's two untranslated collections, the second of which, her collaborative project with the philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, she realized was both formally exciting and conceptually brilliant. Hogue taught in the MFA program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently, The Incognito Body (2006) and Or Consequence (2010), both with Red Hen Press, and the co-authored When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (interview-poems with photographs by Rebecca Ross), published in 2010 in the University of New Orleans Engaged Writers Series. When the Water Came was named a Notable Book in 2010 by Poetry International. Hogue's translations have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, Interim, Poetry International, APR and Field, among other journals. Also known for her criticism, she has published essays on poetry, ranging from that of Emily Dickinson to Kathleen Fraser and Harryette Mullen. Her critical work includes the co-edited editions We Who Love To Be Astonished: Experimental Feminist Poetics and Performance Art (U of Alabama P, 2001); Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (U of Iowa P, 2006); and the first edition of H.D.'s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton (UP of Florida, 2007). Among her honors are a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the H.D. Fellowship at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, an Arizona Commission on the Arts Project Grant, a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and the Witter Bynner Translation Residency Fellowship (with Sylvain Gallais) at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Hogue lives in Arizona with her husband and co-translator, the French economist Sylvain Gallais. She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University. SYLVAIN GALLAIS is a native French speaker transplanted to the U.S. nine years ago. He was born on Feb. 4, 1943 in the Loire River Valley during the German Occupation of France in World War II. Both parents were school teachers who moved often around the Touraine region, and Gallais grew up loving nature, hiking the verdant woods and fields of the area he came to know inside out. At 16, an Eagle Scout, he trained as an orienteer, a skill that has served him well hiking the spectacular mountains of the U.S. Southwest. Thanks to inspiring professors, he enjoyed a classical French education, reading deeply into the great literature of France through the ages. After completing his "Bac" (French Baccalaureat), he opted for practical training in accounting, although he quickly discovered that it was not his métier. He then studied law and economics, finishing his Ph.D. in International Economics in 1978 at F- Rabelais University (Tours) and Paris IX. He completed his second Ph.D. in Political Science in 1982 at the Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politiques in Paris. As Professor of Economics, Gallais specialized in neo-institutional Economics (Classical Liberalism), and additionally, during his last years in France, conducted research in direct democracy ("Citizens' Participation") in technology assessment, which he taught at the Doctoral School of F-Rabelais University. The co-founder of two research teams, Gallais published extensively in the field of direct democracy, and organized two international seminars on the subject. He has been a Visiting Professor in French Literature and Culture at Bucknell University, and is currently Professor of Economics and French at Arizona State University, where he has also served as the Coordinator of the French Program in the International School of Languages and Cultures. His most recent book is France Encounters Globalization. In addition to his co-translations with Cynthia Hogue, Gallais has translated Alberto Rios' novella, The Iguana Killer, into French, a translation which was published in the 2010 edition of the Canadian literary journal Studio. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona with his wife, the poet Cynthia Hogue.